


Wanderlust

by Rosie_Rues



Category: Robin McKinley - Damar series
Genre: Gen, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2008, recipient:Carnadine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-25
Updated: 2008-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-22 19:39:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/241792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rosie_Rues/pseuds/Rosie_Rues





	Wanderlust

Some days Colonel Jack Dedham had the urge to go out of his door, turn through the gates of his fort and keep walking until he reached Damar. He always managed to squash it down, reminding himself that he had sworn an oath to his Queen and his country, and had kept that oath loyally all his life. It was that urge, however, that led him to learn what few words of hilltongue he could and to look on the desert with wonder even in its cruellest moods.

He had been born on the island of Shotlund, off the northwest coast of Home, the cherished only child of elderly parents. From his earliest childhood, his dreams had been full of other lands, places far from the green-grey moors of Shotlund. When his parents died, he had been expected to take over their small croft. Instead he had sold up and joined up, following the drum across the known world.

He had been stationed in jungles, deserts, cities and farmland, across four continents, and he had always felt the urge to go further, to keep looking for something he couldn't even define. Wherever he was stationed, there would always be a morning when the wind blew from the northwest, and he found himself tapping his feet and looking towards the roads again.

Istan wasn't much a place for an old solider to end his career. Plenty of old comrades had told him that when they found out where he was going. But it was the first place he had been where he finally felt like he belonged.

He would retire before he left here, he knew. And he'd stay in Istan, an old soldier who loved the mood of the desert at dawn and the heat of it at noon. And perhaps, just perhaps, on that first day of freedom, he'd go down to the edge of the town at dawn. There he'd make a last trip, walking northwest and over the border.

  



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